


Great, Unstable Mass of Blood and Foam

by Skoll



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: And could be more of one if people...want that I dunno, Bittersweet, Drabble Collection, Gen, Look we all know Obi-Wan has poorly treated generalized anxiety this isn't in question, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Mess, Obi-Wan Kenobi-centric, Padawan Anakin Skywalker, There's like the tiniest hint of a pairing somewhere in here, Young Obi-Wan Kenobi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 20:50:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13174950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skoll/pseuds/Skoll
Summary: A drabble collection about Obi-Wan Kenobi at various points of his life, because I'm Star Wars Garbage (TM).1: Not long into Anakin's training, Obi-Wan has some realizations, deals with them poorly, and makes breakfast, though maybe not in that order.2: Twelve year old Obi-Wan has some slight misgivings about the AgriCorps.  Slight.I will always leave this marked complete, because I don't know exactly when another random drabble will strike me, but I know it won't be a regular occurrence.  If I ever add another chapter then...surprise, I guess.





	1. Let me never love you less

**Author's Note:**

> Uh. Hi folks. I haven't posted anything in a while, I know, and I don't even know if anybody goes here, figuratively speaking, but here I am. Hopefully some people enjoy this. Maybe somewhere in here there's a longer, more coherent story; maybe not. Here's some self-indulgent drabbles anyway.
> 
> Title thieved from a Mountain Goats song called Autoclave which feels...fairly applicable here.

Obi-Wan has spent his whole life being somebody’s failure, and now he is to be Anakin’s.

Well.

....

For the first three months of Anakin’s training, Obi-Wan lives in a constant haze.

It’s not the boy’s fault--but, damn it all, neither is it Obi-Wan’s. He’s permitted to grieve (though some would say not so hard nor so long as he does) for the death of a beloved Master. Every moment seems to bear the echo of Qui-Gon, in absentia. Obi-Wan should feel such pride as he watches his Padawan--the very same Padawan that he himself deemed too old and too angry to succeed--slowly grasp the tenets of the Jedi Way. 

Instead, as Anakin reaches each milestone, Obi-Wan finds terrible memory waiting where paternal pride should lie. In Anakin he sees himself, as a child--Anakin too progresses with the frightened, fierce determination of a child afraid to fail, because failure will see his entire life ripped from his hands--and when Obi-Wan tries to reach out and help, he sees Qui-Gon’s shadow, and falters. He remembers what Qui-Gon’s invaluable help meant to him, when he was in Anakin’s place; he remembers Qui-Gon’s lessons in patience and self-worth, Qui-Gon’s unfailing attention, Qui-Gon’s slow shaping of a frightened boy into a more assured Jedi-in-training. And with Qui-Gon’s quiet, devoted memory looming over him, Obi-Wan cannot help but feel that he offers too little, and says too much.

Somedays, Obi-Wan is lost in Qui-Gon, swallowed up whole by his memory. Though the Jedi Order forbids attachment, their training is rooted in extreme codependence. Masters are the whole world to their young Padawans--first the parents Initiates are forbidden to know, then the teachers that show them the shape of the world, and, later, the friends that Padawans grown to Knighthood know they can always trust, the support structure that new-made Knights might otherwise lack. 

The transition from Padawan training to Knighthood is supposed to ease that chain of dependency, Obi-Wan knows--all around him, he sees his Padawan friends slowly learning distance, slowly finding other people and other relationships to fill the holes their Masters once did. But Obi-Wan was offered no gradual adjustment, no healthy distancing: he was offered sudden severance, first by Qui-Gon’s rash pronouncement to the Council, and then by the swift and final blow of death. Qui-Gon Jinn was, to Obi-Wan, a teacher, a brother in arms, a beloved friend, and the rock against which Obi-Wan found his own stillness; Qui-Gon was everything to him.

( _Everything but a lover_ , he thinks to himself sometimes. He understands, but does not like, the note of wistfulness in his own thought.)

So, against the enormity of Qui-Gon Jinn, the vastness of the hole the man left in his wake, yes, Obi-Wan often finds himself feeling small and lost. Often in those first months, he turns to where Qui-Gon should stand at his back, with some question or joke on his lips, and instead finds Anakin standing there, a sullen afterthought. This...does not improve his relationship with the boy.

This is how, when the first three months of his mourning are ended, when his grief has finally….not dissipated but settled into the ache he thinks it might be for the rest of his life, Obi-Wan awakens one day to realize he scarcely knows his Padawan at all--and, worse, that his Padawan does not particularly like him.

It is not the best of starts, and _damn Qui-Gon Jinn_ for making it his.

…

Obi-Wan makes Anakin breakfast.

He cannot think of a better peace offering--what does his Padawan even enjoy, besides building droids from scrap and nearly getting himself killed at high speeds? Obi-Wan should know this answer already, but he doesn’t. So. Breakfast is easy enough, and Obi-Wan is a fair cook, for all that he and Anakin have been eating commissary food exclusively for months now. 

It’s only as he’s setting the food out on their table that Obi-Wan realizes what he’s done--by force of habit alone, he’s made all of his favorites, and all of Qui-Gon’s. He freezes with his hands full of plates, and abruptly he wants to cry. What will this help, exactly? He doesn’t even know enough about the boy to make him breakfast, let alone raise him to be the _Chosen One_ , and he is twenty-five years old and alone for the first time in his life and he--

He starts again. 

Painstakingly, Obi-Wan calls up every recipe he can find. He uses every bit of what his small kitchen has to offer, and then--in a fit of what may be anxiety, though he’ll deny it later--he runs out to a local grocery and spends a frankly absurd amount of credits on more supplies. He makes everything, everything he can think of that Anakin might even possibly enjoy, and when he is done their table and kitchen countertops are all but overflowing, and it’s not even eight-thirty in the morning.

Obi-Wan sinks slowly into a kitchen chair, becoming newly aware that his robes are dusted liberally with flour and that something wet has found itself into the new beard he’s been growing out. And Anakin, of course, is still asleep--because today is a rest day for Anakin, and now that the boy is free to sleep in, he’s been cherishing every opportunity he has to do so. Obi-Wan feels...ridiculous is perhaps an understatement. His chest is tight, like a band has wrapped around it and _squeezed_ , and Obi-Wan will either laugh or cry until he chokes if he lets his emotions continue to wreak havoc like this. 

So it is that Obi-Wan, still covered in flour and surrounded by all too much breakfast food, sinks into an impromptu meditation atop a kitchen chair.

...

He’s roused, at last, by Anakin’s wary sounding, “Master?”

Obi-Wan’s eyes flicker open, and he takes a deep breath. His chest, much to his relief, feels lighter now; he thinks he meditated for perhaps an hour, and clearly he needed it badly. “Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, and meets his Padawan’s carefully blank gaze. “Come in. I, ah, made breakfast.”

“I can see that,” Anakin says. The words come out slowly--Anakin, perhaps reasonably, does not seem to know what to make of this display--and yet Anakin does in fact step further into their kitchen, and Obi-Wan is willing to count that as a tiny success.

“I didn’t know what you liked to eat.” Does Anakin hear that for the stark admission of fault that Obi-Wan knows it to be? He’s a bright child; certainly he seems to listen with more interest, intrigued to hear what Obi-Wan will say next. Obi-Wan draws in another very deep breath, and says, “I haven’t been very fair to you these last few months. In fact, I may not have been fair to you once in the entire time you’ve known me. And while I recognize that asking for a fresh start would be unkind, I thought I might as least offer an apology. So. Breakfast.”

For the first time, Anakin meets his eyes and really means the gaze--there’s nothing shielded in Anakin’s expression, nothing carefully hidden away. (Or maybe, Obi-Wan is forced to acknowledge, Anakin has given him this much before, but Obi-Wan did not know to look for it. Maybe Anakin has been reaching out all this time, trying to bridge a vast gap not of his own making. Obi-Wan hopes not. The thought is...humbling and unbearable, in equal measures.) “I don’t understand,” Anakin says.

“I should’ve been kinder to you when we first met,” Obi-Wan begins, because the absolute start of their relationship already merits an apology. “I felt abandoned, when my Master turned me aside for you, and I took those feelings out on you rather than addressing them. I, ah. I haven’t stopped doing that, I fear. My place over these past few months should have been to help you, as much as I can. To introduce you to temple life and to everything that it means to be Jedi. Instead I let my grief hinder me.” There’s so much more to apologize for, but the words stick in Obi-Wan’s teeth, and all he can do is look at the child he’s so severely disserviced. “I am sorry,” he says instead, as sincerely as he knows how.

“It’s easy to say you’re sorry.” Here, again, is the child forced to grow too quickly, too knowing for his age--there’s something in Anakin’s eyes that makes it clear to Obi-Wan that Anakin’s heard hundreds of useless apologies before in his life. “Will you change?”

Obi-Wan closes his eyes and hopes he is not damning himself when he says, “I’ll try.”

They stay there a long, silent moment, frozen in an uncomfortable tableau of unaccepted apologies and breakfast foods. Then Obi-Wan says, forcing his voice to lightness, “You’d be well within your rights to petition the Council for a different Master.”

“Do you want me to?” Anakin’s voice is small, but steady; whatever the answer is, Anakin will abide by it.

Even as a part of Obi-Wan clamors _yes yes please I’m too young and I’m frightened_ , Obi-Wan knows his answer. “No,” he says, for a moment he feels the word resound in the Force--he’s made a choice that will come to change things, one way or another. “I promised my Master that I would train you myself.”

Anakin begins to withdraw, his gaze shuttering and his posture closing off, and Obi-Wan sees immediately where he’s misstepped, and finds another truth. “Even if I hadn’t made that promise,” he says, and feels Anakin opening up again, minutely, “I would be pleased to have you as my Padawan, Anakin. I think...I think that given time, you’ll become a Jedi who I’ll be deeply proud to have trained.”

“Master--” Anakin begins, and Obi-Wan hesitates (for every wrong reason, he chides himself a thousand times, so, so much later) and says:

“Call me Obi-Wan, Anakin.” He smiles at the boy. “Until you feel I’ve earned the right to be called your Master.”

(Anakin, newly freed from slavery. Anakin, who spent all his life answering to one Master or another, and, freed, found himself again answering to a foolish arrogant _child_ who never _thought_ \--)

“Obi-Wan, then,” Anakin says, then, with a note of relief that Obi-Wan will misinterpret for years to come. With the sort of forgiveness only a child offers, Anakin says, “...I think breakfast might be cold.”

And Obi-Wan laughs, and feels just a little brighter than he did before. “You know, Padawan, I believe you might be right. Let’s see about heating some of this, shall we?”


	2. If my prayer be not humble, make it so

The AgriCorps should not frighten Obi-Wan, he knows. Even now, as he lingers on the cusp between twelve and thirteen, with the AgriCorps looming ahead of every day in which he fails to find a Master, Obi-Wan knows that fearing the AgriCorps only proves right every master who will not take him. 

Working in the AgriCorps is no bad fate; a life of clean Earth and warm sun, a life of feeding those who otherwise would starve, is certainly a good life. Though Obi-Wan would never achieve the rank of Jedi Knight within the ‘Corps, he would not be denied use of the Force either. Rather, his days would be full of the Force, as he lived and worked surrounded by the Living Force himself. Maybe the AgriCorps is just what he needs, to settle the imbalance in him and finally break him of his over-reliance on the Unifying Force. Certainly, Obi-Wan knows, no Jedi would fear the AgriCorps.

Obi-Wan is no Jedi. Obi-Wan is a slight, frightened twelve-year-old who hasn’t come into his growth yet and likely will never rise above the rank of Initiate. Obi-Wan lies awake at night with his hands on his training ‘sabre, and when he does sleep he dreams that all the Masters of the Council have come with grasping fingers to wrench his sabre away and tell him he’s unworthy. Sometimes other Masters join in his nightmares; the very worst nights are the ones when Qui-Gon Jinn looks him in the eyes, as clinically as he did when he watched Obi-Wan fall apart in the training ring, and calmly breaks his fingers to take his lightsaber away.

**Author's Note:**

> Please drop a review if you liked it, or if you didn't, or whatever. Authors grow from feedback, and I am very out of practice here.


End file.
